Bad Girls

by Phelps, M. William

  “And Bob,” Burns told me, “who had that fixation with Jennifer and really wanted to have sex with her and had been for a long time . . . [he] bonds them out of jail. And then Bob gives them that ultimatum. ‘I bailed y’all out of jail, so I want me some of Jennifer as my payback.’ I think the plot is hatched at that point.”

  Except, from all accounts, Bob didn’t present his “ultimatum” to them, as Mike Burns had explained it to me. Instead, Bob Dow allegedly had propositioned Jen alone in the truck.

  Burns believed that was the magic moment when, he believed, Jen and Bobbi said to each other, “We got to get rid of this son of a bitch.” Because when Burns looked at their actions from that point forward, he explained further, it was clear to him that every step the girls took from that moment forward was “a premeditated plan to kill Bob.” Burns believed Bobbi told Jen to seduce Bob in the bedroom so Jen would have an opportunity to whack him. Bobbi’s motive, Burns was now certain, turned out to be as unpretentious as most murder plots. He theorized Bobbi said: “We’ll be free of this guy and we can go on with our lives. Move to California. Live in the sand and surf.” And Jennifer agreed with it, Burns alleged.

  The glue holding this theory together turned dry and brittle, once it was applied to the evidence. For one, Bobbi could have walked away from Bob Dow whenever she wanted, same as Jen. Bob Dow was in no condition or position to stop Bobbi from doing anything she didn’t want to. Look at the evidence of Bobbi telling Kathy and Audrey that she wanted to go to Mexico. Bobbi was fleeing a bad situation of her friend having just murdered someone, not pursuing a pipe dream, as Burns put it, of moving to California with Jen and starting some white-picket-fence life together. In addition, Bobbi had left Bob before this moment, several times. More than any of that, though: Bobbi had a strong motive to keep Bob alive. He was her source of everything she desired most in life (even more than her own child) : sex, drugs, and alcohol.

  From where Burns decided to prosecute his case, he believed Bobbi was “inside the house in the living room” when Jen capped Bob in the bedroom. “When [Bobbi] heard the shot, she runs into the bedroom. Jennifer climbs off the guy. He’s still moving and kind of groaning. So Bobbi Jo says, ‘He’s still moving, so finish him off.’ And Jennifer stands at the edge of the bed and unloads the pistol into his head and one in the arm.”

  Burns got this entire scenario from Bobbi’s second statement. It all fit into the design Burns had constructed; and it even sounded good on paper. The question remained, though, could Burns prove his theory to twelve jurors? Bobbi refused to plead guilty. Bobbi couldn’t believe what was happening. She was innocent. Nobody would fall for this nonsense Burns was spinning.

  Here it was, November 29, 2005; Jen was locked up in Gatesville Prison, already serving her time, and Bobbi, alone, seated in a courtroom with a new lawyer, was facing the rest of her life for a crime she claimed to have had nothing to do with. And as Bobbi sat in court, listening to Burns lay out the state’s case against her, she couldn’t have scripted the tale this guy was putting out there.

  Mike Burns boiled his thoughts down into one basic argument, beginning the state’s opening with: “This is a case about relationships between two young women . . . and it’s about murder. And I believe the evidence will show in this case the following—Bobbi Jo Smith, the defendant, and a young woman by the name of Jennifer Jones were lovers, and they lived together under the roof and in the house of a man named Bob Dow. . . .”

  From that moment forward, Burns did his best to sell his theory of an extreme (maybe even obsessive) love affair between Bobbi Jo and Jennifer that turned into a need to rid themselves of what Burns projected to be the one obstacle standing in the way of their happy ever after.

  “And the evidence is going to show that this defendant took advantage of the dependence that Jennifer had on her.... The evidence will show that the plan was to kill Bob Dow—and the evidence will show that it was Bobbi Jo’s idea.”

  A bold offering from an experienced attorney—after all, proving an idea was about as hard as proving how much in love the two girls were.

  Nearly impossible.

  Next, Burns put words in Bobbi’s mouth, explaining to jurors how Bobbi once told Jen: “We need to kill Bob. . . . We have to. We have to kill Bob because that is the only way that we can be together and be free of this man. He’s not going to molest me again—anymore. He’s not going to molest you anymore. We’re going to kill Bob.”

  All very audacious statements Mike Burns attributed to Bobbi Jo Smith, but he did not say where each word had come from.

  As he continued, Burns painted Bobbi as the mastermind/puppeteer to Jen’s more naïve, willing, and weaker character, placing the entire onus of the crime on Bobbi.

  He spoke of how Jen lured Bob and how they walked into Jerry Jones’s Spanish Trace apartment after the murder. Meanwhile, entirely changing his theory from his opening statement during Jen’s penalty hearing, Burns said: “This defendant, Bobbi Jo, told the girls, ‘We just killed Bob.’”

  In his opening statement that past April, Mike Burns said Jen first announced, “I killed Bob.” But now, during Bobbi’s trial, he put those words into Bobbi’s mouth.

  And nobody challenged this.

  Then Burns moved onto that now infamous road trip, focusing on how Bobbi tossed the weapon out the window as they drove out of town.

  How Bobbi called the shots as they made their way across Texas.

  How Krystal decided she wanted out.

  How, Burns said, “they”—Bobbi and Jen—worked “on their story” during the entire road trip.

  How Bobbi and Jen ditched Audrey and Kathy in Arizona because Bobbi believed they were talking to the police.

  How they “cooked up” their first statements—admission documents Mike Burns himself referred to as “hogwash”—to “protect themselves.” And how a second statement Bobbi gave to police was not gibberish at all (like her first), but what law enforcement believed to be the truth: Bobbi gave Jen the gun after loading it and then sent her into that bedroom to murder Bob. And yet, Burns left out (either knowingly or unknowingly), nowhere in that second statement did Bobbi ever admit to convincing, asking, or manipulating Jen into killing Bob Dow.

  Still, the question—rhetorical or otherwise—that no one seemed interested in asking hung in the hot air of Mike Burns’s opening: Why believe the second statement of a defendant’s if you are not going to believe the first? And what about that one line Jen had said to her mother during the road trip? After Kathy had asked Jen how it felt to kill someone, Jen allegedly replied, “Pretty fucking good.” Did that sound like a young woman being forced into murder?

  Lastly, Burns promised the jury that they’d hear from Jen herself, now a born-again Christian, who was ready to tell the true story of what happened, clear her conscience, and send Bobbi to prison. He failed to say, though, that this would be Jen’s fifth version of the events in question: first and second statement (one and two), her testimony from the penalty phase of her sentencing hearing (three), her bizarre tale of clear, outright lies in Texas Monthly (four), and now this, Jen’s imminent testimony in Bobbi’s trial.

  “And when all of the evidence comes in ... ,” Burns concluded, “we’re going to come back to you, and we’re going to ask you to find this defendant guilty of murder.”

  CHAPTER 54

  BOBBI’S ATTORNEY, Jim Matthews, later claimed he had been paid only $50 for taking Bobbi’s case. “That,” he told me, “and a night in a hotel room.” Essentially, Matthews had taken the case pro bono.

  With his sharp and noticeable Texas drawl, Jim Matthews approached jurors and said there was “quite a different story” to tell from what Mr. Burns had just whipped up. Matthews called it “the rest of the story,” quoting famous radio personality Paul Harvey.

  “Bobbi Jo just didn’t do it. She just didn’t do it. And the evidence is going to show that Jennifer Jones, not Bobbi Jo, murdered Bob Dow in cold blood—not in
self-defense.”

  Important point.

  Bobbi needed jurors to accept this scenario in order to walk. Not that she didn’t have anything to do with killing Bob; that wasn’t at issue here. But Jen, after a cumulative life of emotional ups and downs, sexual abuse and promiscuity and chronic drug use, snapped, taking a shitty life of letdowns and emotional pain (baggage) all out on Bob Dow, who had made one too many passes at her after treating the woman Jen loved so horribly. Effectively, Jen became obsessed with Bobbi. That obsession and the fact that Bob was treating Bobbi like his personal sex slave, and Jen sat back and watched, had manifested into an evil plot within Jen’s fragile psyche. She couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted Bobbi all to herself, so she murdered the guy.

  Matthews began with a play on what Burns had said earlier, noting how “the first two statements were hogwash.”

  Bobbi’s attorney then walked over to a projector his legal aide had set up.

  Mike Burns took notice.

  “Is that focused?” Matthews asked his aide.

  A photograph of Bobbi, as a baby, was projected onto the screen for jurors. Matthews began, “She was—like anybody else—brought up into this world the natural way.”

  Burns could not believe what he was seeing and hearing. You’ve got to be kidding me! The prosecutor nearly came out of his skin. He stood. “Your Honor . . . I object. This is improper for an opening statement. This is evidence.”

  “Sustained. You may give verbal without the—”

  Matthews interrupted, finishing for the judge: “Photograph?”

  “Photographs!” the judge snapped. “Unless they’re submitted into evidence.”

  Then Ninth Judicial District judge Jerry Ray said something interesting. He explained to Matthews that the use of photos and videos in his courtroom during Bobbi’s trial was going to be limited and watched carefully, adding, “I don’t want to see that trash in my courtroom.”

  Judge Ray said it “very sternly,” Matthews recalled.

  “It (those sexually explicit photos of Bob Dow and the girls) was here during that first trial ( Jen’s penalty hearing),” Judge Ray continued, “and if you want to present it again, you had better have a damn good reason for it.”

  Strange thing to say about actual evidence that was, in many respects, a focal point of this case: the fact that the girls were starring and participating in these films.

  Nonetheless, Matthews took the hint, telling me later: “They needed those photos and videos during Jennifer’s penalty phase because it helped them say that Mr. Dow was a slime bag and deserved it and here’s all this proof.... It was fine with me that Judge Ray didn’t want it. My argument wasn’t that Bobbi did it and Mr. Dow deserved it. My argument was that she didn’t do it.”

  Still, those photographs tell a story. A court watcher would think that they’d be crucial to Bobbi’s case. There are plenty of films that display Bobbi’s and Jen’s chronic drug use. They also show how Bobbi and Jen had sex in front of spectators, and that the sex wasn’t some sort of intimate moment between two females in love, but more or less another day in the life of Bobbi, who was bouncing through all of it with the sole intention of getting high.

  Without showing the photographs, Matthews fell back into Bobbi’s history. He spoke of her early life as the only girl in a family of boys and how, as a child, Bobbi took pleasure in taking the blame for things her siblings often did. Bobbi’s life was actually going well, according to Matthews, until she met her son’s father and fell in love and had a child. When Bobbi and her son’s father split up, Matthews added, “Bob Dow welcomed Bobbi Jo into his home and really became a close friend of hers. She looked at him as a father, a friend, and even sometimes a lover . . . and you’re going to hear that even at one point [Bob Dow] proposed marriage to her.”

  Marriage?

  As Bobbi sat and listened, she considered that Matthews did not give the jury a complete picture of the relationship she’d had with Bob. But what could she say? She trusted Matthews and placed her freedom in his hands.

  “She turned him down,” Matthews continued. “But not because she was mad at him. He was just a lot older than her.... She just couldn’t see him being her husband for the rest of her life.”

  Matthews, knowing full well that conservative Texas courts liked to keep things clean, walked jurors slowly into what he obviously viewed as a taboo subject to approach inside Judge Ray’s courtroom : Bobbi Jo’s sexuality.

  “[You] may or may not agree with what you hear about Bobbi Jo and some sexual things. But that doesn’t make her a murderer. She and Bob Dow . . . they liked each other. He cared about her. She cared about him.”

  The idea with this opening was to paint a complete picture of the Bob Dow/Bobbi Jo Smith relationship. Matthews did a fair job of it. He spoke of how Bob taught Bobbi the construction trade, took her on as an apprentice, and even explained how the business side of things worked.

  “She was kind of a tomboy,” Matthews explained, adding how Bobbi “enjoyed being outdoors” and “working with her hands and . . . she could begin to try to feel self-supported and maybe someday raise [her son] on her own.”

  The way Matthews portrayed the relationship, a listener would be hard-pressed not to believe that Bob Dow and Bobbi Smith, at one time, had a loving bond—same as maybe a father and his daughter.

  But then Matthews digressed, delivering the ugly punch line to his father-daughter bombast: “You’re going to learn that Jennifer was jealous . . . of the relationship between Bobbi Jo and Bob Dow. She didn’t like Bob Dow. Bob Dow didn’t necessarily like her. He kind of wanted to have sex with her, but he was kind of like that. And that’s one of the reasons that you’ll hear that Jennifer killed him. She wanted him out of the way.” Then Matthews raised his voice, shouting: “She didn’t like the triangle. Two is company and three is a crowd. And she wanted to end that. . . .”

  If one was to look at the case objectively—and neither lawyer could do that, of course—one would draw the conclusion that Jim Matthews, on the basis of the law, had a solid argument here. If he was to take Jen’s journal and build on all of the self-hatred she’d harbored, her promiscuity and disobedience, her criminal record, on top of the low self-esteem she brought into the relationship with Bobbi, he’d have one hell of a case to present for a girl gone bad—a girl gone terribly wrong, who was in no position to enter into a relationship with a woman for the first time. And when Jen testified, Matthews could easily impeach her testimony with her own words from that journal. Jen had been let down again and again by her lovers. Here, she met Bobbi and—there can be no doubt—became immediately infatuated and arguably obsessed as soon as Bobbi showed affection and cared for her. She followed Bobbi everywhere. She would not allow Bobbi out of her sight. Even when faced with the notion that Bobbi was not exclusive to her, Jen continued the relationship.

  “The photos of Jen and I having sex was all at once,” Bobbi told me. “Our ‘sex life’ was not what you think. All of those photos were taken with several other women.... I remember having sex with Jennifer . . . [but] she had a boyfriend. She’d leave and go with him all the time. [Our affair] wasn’t a ‘relationship’—it was drugs.”

  Part of the problem Bobbi had (and she didn’t even realize it) in proving how desperate, despondent, codependent, and abandoned by love Jen was when she walked into Bobbi’s life turned out to be that Jen’s journal (which would have told jurors a lot about Jen’s character) was sitting in a box inside her aunt’s house collecting dust. It would never be entered into the record as evidence. Nobody had interviewed Jen’s aunt and found out about the journal. Bobbi’s legal team of Jim Matthews did not have the resources to hire a private investigator to conduct its own investigation (which might have produced the journal and more), or located other witnesses to back up the idea that Jen had a history of violence and her life was spiraling out of control when she met Bobbi.

  Bobbi also believed—and Matthews backed up her claim—t
hat part of the reason she was so vigorously prosecuted (and perhaps grossly over-prosecuted) fell into a well-choreographed plot to punish her because she was a lesbian.

  “In reality,” Bobbi explained, “they all could not stand me. The county jail (where Bobbi was being held) threw me in a cell with no water and not even a toilet. I had my skin break out and they refused to treat me. They did me wrong . . . just because they knew I was gay. They wanted to ridicule me and put me alone so [as I was told over and over] I’d ‘stop screwing women.’ They called me names for being gay. . . . They lashed out over my sexual preference and tried me in a court, where I had no chance!”

  Matthews became somewhat grandiose at one point during his opening, asserting, “And, you know, Bobbi Jo is many things . . . and it’s so important what you’re doing as a jury. This country is the greatest country on the face of the earth. We have the most powerful military. We have the most powerful political system—”

  But Burns had heard enough. “I object. This is argument, not opening statement, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained. . . .”

  “Anyway,” Matthews continued, “I hope that you keep your hearts and your minds open to hear the rest of the story, because there is another side. It is very important to hear the other side of the story and to know everything before you begin to make up your mind about it.” He paused. “Thank you.”

  For Jim Matthews at this stage, there were just a few words about Bobbi and Bob, and no promises of groundbreaking evidence or a surprise witness who would persuade the jury. It was as if Matthews was confident on the merit of his case alone, and he didn’t need to carry on with rhetoric or conjecture. He wanted to get on with the trial.

  The judge took a fifteen-minute recess.

  CHAPTER 55

  AFTER THE BREAK, MIKE Burns introduced his star witness. Jennifer Jones had changed. She was nineteen and had packed on some prison weight, about thirty pounds by several estimates. She had that hard, weathered look of a woman who had become part of the penal system. She was a number now. No longer that light-skinned, smiling teen, effeminate and girly, out in the world looking for a good time. Here was a woman, by all accounts, who clearly was comfortable in her new role as a convict.